Ha ha!

You certainly never know what movie he'll review next!

Thursday, 19 November 2015

Burl reviews They Live! (1988)

Attention, sleepers, it’s Burl here to let you know just
what’s really going on! Ha ha, the
movie I’d like to talk about today is John Carpenter’s marvelous mini-epic They Live! Now, we know that for years,
Carpenter flung great movies at us like throwing stars – Halloween, The Fog, The Thing and Prince of Darkness, to name only just a few! All terrific! And do
you know what? They Live is another
terrific one!

But it’s a severely compromised terrific one, ha ha! For one
thing, there simply wasn’t the budget to stage the large-scale revolution the
movie seems to be angling towards! It’s not just a budget issue though, but, I
regret to say, a third-act failure of momentum and imagination!

However, there’s so much that’s good about the picture that
it still remains one of my favourite Carpenter movies, and that’s saying a lot!
It’s as class-conscious as genre movies get, and probably more relevant today
than ever before! Ha ha, one cringes to imagine what the special glasses would
show on your computer screen; but on the other hand, it probably wouldn’t have
to be too different than what we see already! Ha ha!

I’ll back up a bit and describe the story for those who for
whatever crazy reason have never seen this movie: an unemployed
construction-drifter arrives in Los Angeles and discovers, by way of a special
pair of sunglasses, that the world is not what it seems! In actual fact, the
world is black-and-white and is completely run by skull-faced aliens, who
occupy positions of wealth, power and privilege while disguised as ordinary
humans! No less an authority than George “Buck” Flower, wearing a tuxedo for
perhaps the only time in his film career, informs us that there are no
countries, no borders, that the aliens are “runnin’ the whole show!”

None of this feels particularly unlikely – it’s as good an
explanation as any for the massive income inequality and rampant oppression we
see in the world today! For most of the movie, Carpenter does a fantastic job
of doling out the situation in spooky little nuggets of paranoia: a ranting
street preacher shut down by cops; helicopters circling menacingly; a bearded
explicator straight out of Dawn of the
Dead appearing on TV, trying but failing to convince his viewers of the
truth! We get dropped into the story much as our burly hero does, and are every
bit as unsettled!

Carpenter really did a great job casting this thing, because
everyone, actors and wrestlers alike, is terrific! Rowdy Roddy Piper does a
marvelous job appearing baffled and mind-blown; Keith David, from Roadhouse and The Quick and the Dead, is marvelous as ever; Raymond St. Jacques
makes an excellent street preacher (though it doesn’t make a lot of sense for
the resistance movement to host his heat-score rantings right in front of their
secret headquarters, ha ha!); Peter Jason from Streets of Fire, Dreamscape
and Brewster’s Millions does solid
work; Sy Richardson from Repo Man
shows up as another resistance fighter; John Lawrence, the angry sheriff from The Pom Pom Girls, plays the television
beardsman; Meg Foster from Masters of the
Universe uses her bright blue eyes to good effect; John Goff from Alligator and Maniac Cop makes an appearance as a frowny businessman alien; and then of course
there’s our man Flower, who had a fine role in Pumpkinhead, but may be best known from his role as the skeezy
plumber who turned out to be the heroine’s father in Teen Lust! Why the aliens would feel the need to recruit a drawling
stewbum into their ranks remains a mystery, but this is truly a film of
mysteries!

Ha ha, and I haven’t even mentioned the big alleyway battle,
which I won’t because it’s been well-covered elsewhere! I’ll simply say that,
flawed though it is, They Live is a
terrific paranoid thriller whose reach exceeds its grasp! Well, there are
certainly greater sins than that! I’m going to give this fine motion picture
three and a half hours long, which is the running time it deserves! Ha ha!